Research

Computer Science

Research

Dr. Kathie Yerion:

With colleagues at colleges similar to Gonzaga around the Northwest, She has been participating in a National Science Foundation CPATH grant for the NorthWest Distributed Computer Science Department (NWDCSC) on “computational thinking across disciplines.” The website is http://ai.vancouver.wsu.edu/~nwdcsd/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
She participated in two curriculum modules associated with this grant: she developed a module on “How Animals Get Their Stripes” http://ai.vancouver.wsu.edu/~nwdcsd/wiki/index.php/How_animals_get_their_stripes
Dr. Yerion taught this two-week teaching module multiple times in two quite different courses – ENSC 244 Computer Methods for Engineers (for Mechanical Engineering majors) and CPSC 450 Advanced Algorithms (for Computer Science majors). This effort resulting in a publication, “Alan Turing, Animal Spots, and Algorithms”, The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Vol 28, No 1, October 2012, p. 169-175 and an associated presentation at the Northwest Regional Consortium of Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC).

Dr. Paul De Palma:

Automatic speech recognition (ASR). There have been great strides in the past two decades in ASR research with the introduction of probabilistic methods. But these systems don't work nearly as well as we would like with speech from multiple people using an unconstrained vocabulary. Beginning with the observation that speech and writing differ in significant ways, He has been working on a set of techniques to build a recognizer that bypasses words altogether, passing on the sense of speech, rather than actual text, to another piece of a dialog system. This, of course, is what humans do when asked, for example, "What did Mary just say?" His collaborators on this effort are Dr. Charles Wooters of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and Dr. George Luger of the University of New Mexico.

Dr. Shawn Bowers:

Dr. Bowers’ research interests are in scientific data management, where he has worked on scientific workflow technology, data integration, and data provenance. Through collaborations with colleagues at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara, he is an investigator on three NSF-funded research projects focused on developing new techniques for data integration and discovery of ecological and biodiversity data using formal logic-based approaches. These projects have provided a number of research opportunities at Gonzaga University for undergraduate students in computer science. More recently, Dr. Bowers work has explored distrubuted and high-performance computing approaches for optimizing data-intensive workflow systems as well as new database techniques that exploit semantic approaches for describing and querying graph data.

Dr. Yanping Zhang:

Her research interests include mathematical modeling and simulation, cyber security, wireless communication, and wireless sensor networks (WSN) with a special concern on collaboration among sensors and robots. Her current research lies in the surveillance application of WSN, focusing on intrusion detection, large area surveillance methodology, bio-inspired communication, collaboration among sensors and robots, etc. She is now collaborating with networking research groups at the University of Alabama.